Start of new Research Project: Klaus-Tschira-Stiftung funded Project “HiFiLab: A High-Fidelity Laboratory for the Simulation of Celestial Bodies with their Space Environment” (2022 – 2025)

In this project, we focus on generating a novel computational simulation framework to describe the interaction of plasma with celestial bodies. Understanding the interaction of celestial bodies with their space environment is very important, as it often reveals information about their inner structure and the existence/composition of their atmospheres. Of fundamental importance is the question about liquid water under the icy surface of some moons of the solar system, as water is considered to be one of the essential ingredients for life as we know it.In the last years, we have successfully designed a high-order accurate 3D unstructured discontinuous Galerkin (DG) open source solver with fully parallel adaptive mesh refinement for single-fluid magnetohydrodynamics. DG methods are famous for their high accuracy, their high flexibility and extreme parallel scaling capabilities and are thus perfectly suited for complex plasma interaction simulations. We plan a major step forward regarding the physical modeling fidelity of our computational plasma framework, by extending our high-order DG solver to multi-ion MHD models that account for the interaction of electrons, ions, and neutrals. We will further apply the resulting novel computational plasma framework to simulate the Jovian moon Europa and compare our results with data taken by space missions during flybys of the moon and observations from the Hubble Space Telescope to gain insight and better understanding of the complex plasma interactions.